A Paean To Putrid Prose

``in A Gastly Rain Driven By A Mad El Nino...''

Well, sometimes, your name on the radio, or a late night congratulatory call, or maybe a few free drinks at the local watering hole.

``Well, I should hope so,'' said Bill Sanders, a University of Hartford sociology professor. This week, Sanders won in the detective division of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which honors particularly bad opening lines of imaginary novels.

``It's the most wonderful thing to happen to me all day,'' he said.

The contest is named for author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, a Victorian novelist who began his 1830 novel, ``Paul Clifford,'' with ``It was a dark and stormy night,'' the same line Snoopy the cartoon beagle uses to start his novel on his doghouse roof.

In his graduate school days, Scott Rice, now a San Jose State University English professor, wrote a paper on Bulwer-Lytton, and in 1982 he dreamed up the fiction contest as a way to honor bad prose. The first year, three participants submitted entries. Rice said this year's contest drew thousands of lousy paragraphs from around the world.

In fact, the winners in divisions such as romance, western, adventure and science fiction are usually accomplished wordsmiths. Sanders has written nearly 40 books, most of them computer and academic texts, the latest of which is ``Gang Bangs and Drive-Bys,'' a study of urban gangs.

``Someone likened us to someone imitating a drunk on roller skates,'' Rice said. ``It's getting more and more competitive.''

So competitive that Rice said one recent winner threatened to actually finish the book whose first line made him a Bulwer-Lytton winner.

``That was a true threat,'' Rice said. ``I never heard from him again. Perhaps a publisher had him whacked.''

Bob Perry of Milton, Mass., was the contest's grand prize winner. Two other Connecticut writers -- Brian Kinlan of New Haven and Neil Massie of Ridgefield -- also scored big.

Kinlan was named runner-up in romance, with an opening that started: ``Her toes tingled when she saw him -- mostly the two outer toes, the little ones, whose nails had been ripped off by a lawnmower when she was three . . . ''

Massie won dishonorable mention in the miscellaneous category: ``She sighed, not just any sigh, but one of those deep, deep sighs that, emanating from the depths of your lower respiratory tract, works its way upward, then explodes out of you, pervading the surrounding area'' and so on.

The Bulwer-Lytton contest is one of the few remaining literary contests unsullied by a big prize package.

``I would be embarrassed to say the amount'' prize winners earn, Rice said, ``but the winners become household names who have to contend with groupies and overtures from attractive young people of both genders.''

``I've been told not to discuss the amount over the phone,'' said Sanders, who with his wife, Delia, an Institute of Living psychotherapist, has four grown children. ``My tax attorney and accountant are going to go into a spin over the whole thing.''

This is Sanders' first writing contest, and he is suitably modest.

``I thought they picked the winners kind of randomly,'' he said. ``I read the others on the Web page, and they were a lot better than mine -- in a worse way.'' The contest's home page is at http://www.bulwer-lytton.com.

Rice said two types of people enter the contest: good writers who are trying to be bad, and bad writers trying to be good writers trying to be bad. Sanders said he is a member of a third category, ``someone pretending to be a writer.''

``I was trained in sociology,'' said Sanders. ``We know how to write badder than anyone.''

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Bad, Bad Writing. Very Bad

Here's the award-winning, horribly written passage by Bill Sanders, a professor at the University of Hartford:

``In a ghastly rain driven by a mad El Nino, as Dr. Ann L. View, forensic proctologist, arrived at the crime scene in her Ford Probe, it was not initially obvious that the victim, a thirty-something, somebody, had met his (or her, she could not be certain in that damnable El Nino-driven rain) demise by impalement by a foreign object (imported, that is) that had pierced his (or her) heart after being inserted into his (or her) body in a region below and behind the stomach.''

Here's the bad line that started it all, from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel ``Paul Clifford'':

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents -- except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercly agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.